Part Two: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

We continue the life and times of Richard Marcinko as he enters the Vietnam War and immediately commits numerous war crimes for the CIA. Then he gets to invent SEAL Team 6!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast
that again I did that year. Listening now a bit anyway,
I'm Robert, you know me. We're talking about Richard, the
Navy Seals guy, you know, and and my guest is
again Andrew T.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Andrew. What are you doing, buddy?

Speaker 3 (00:20):
Ah good? Still here? Still alive. Yeah, it's a little
it's it's warm, but I'm alive. This is great.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
It's warm, but you're alive, just like everyone else in
the eternal summer that is increasingly gripping the world. Well, yeah,
let's distract ourselves from our problems by thinking about a
man who lived a charm and mirthful life of constant
war crimes. The Seal Team six guy, Old Dicky marks Richard.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
A question, not to be glib. Why is Seal Team
six like, is there I assume one through five? Or
is this like a James Bond situation.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
We'll talk about that, don't worry, we'll talk about that.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's actually a fun story. But yeah,
at this point, initially there are like two teams, but
each team is like hundreds of guys, right, They're divided
into platoons and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
So it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
When you hear like Seal Team six, you might think like, well,
that's like six guys or ten. Now there's like hundreds of.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Guys like Seal Team six.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
There's a lot of Team six guys. Okay, okay, yeah,
exactly right. So when we ended last episode, the newly
formed Navy Seals along with newly made Navy Seal Richard Marsenko,
had been shipped to Vietnam and started partnering with the

(01:39):
CIA to carry out Phoenix missions all over the waterfront, right,
And you know these are you're killing informants and are
like informants bringing in for You're killing and capturing guys,
You're having them tortured by the CIA, You're getting more info,
You're going after other guys. You know, it's this kind
of self perpetuating loop of targets, right, that's what they

(02:00):
create with with Phoenix, and that's what the Seals are.
They're kind of fighting their own separate war that's occurring
alongside the rest of Vietnam. But it's really just like
the Seals and the CIA murdering a fuck loaded dudes, right, yeah, and.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Based off of it now that we know also, it's like, yeah,
just mostly because someone told them to yeah, because.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Some guys said, like, yeah, this guy's definitely a facilitator
for the Viet Cong or whatever, and often for less
reason than that, as we'll discuss right now. Because seals
report to themselves, they can kill for the CIA without
any issues or without abiding by any of the rules
of war. Right Like, there's the Seals are supposed to
abide by the rules of war. They're not supposed to
be any units in the US military that are exempt

(02:45):
from them. But practically the Seals don't have to abide
by the rules of war, right right. These guys are
nearly always to go into battle on dexa dream. They
will avoid sleeping for debt speed. That's just like straight
up old style speed, so they are wired as fuck
on speed. They're usually operating at night, and the fact
that they are both highest tits not sleeping for days.

(03:07):
Killing people at night means they screw up constantly. These
guys kill the wrong people all the fucking time. Phillips ads.
The intel Seals received was often suspect. A farmer might
finger his neighbor over an old grudge. A corrupt official
might turn in someone to whom he owed money. Fishing
boats the seals ambushed because someone said they were used
by viet Cong couriers often turned out to be nothing

(03:29):
but fishing boats. Purported viet Cong bases burned to the
ground were sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by
simple peasants.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
Cool, so you know.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
They're fighting a fun war. That's Richard Marsenko's baptism of
fire light a lot of huts on fire. In Code
Over Country, Matthew Cole writes that from the Jump, Navy
brass were hesitant to embrace the seals because, among other things,
they're not like working for the Navy a lot of
the time, like the Navy muney have a use for them,
like they did for the Frogment, but the CIA is like, not,
we got.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Some of these guys to do.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
They actually don't ask. They're going to show up on
board periodically when they need a break, and they're going
to be like, they're gonna have long hair, they're gonna
smell like shit, and they're all going to be doing
illegal drugs on your boat and just don't say anything, right,
you're not allowed to. Maybe brass don't like that all
the time, right, Seals often get a reputation of looking

(04:19):
and acting like insane criminals. Cole quotes a seal captain
at the time who told him we had no status,
no standing in the regular Navy. Some part of the
Navy saw us as a sort of quasi criminal element,
not a respected profession that should only be used in
desperate circumstances, and when you were through using it, you
would stop forever, like it was some sort of a
moral activity. So the Navy kind of treated them like drugs,

(04:41):
like the speed they were on.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Just one less, one less hit, one less hit.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, one last hit, but then I'm going clean. I'm
going clean.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
From special operators, the seals were seen like some sort
of a moral activity because they often did immoral things.
In his book Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms there's different.
This is again there's like a thousand or so seals
in Vietnam, I think at the height so, and there's
factions within them. They're not all the same, and they're
not all doing the same kinds of missions. They're not

(05:08):
all doing Phoenix missions for the CIA.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Seals do other stuff too, obviously, to to kind of
describe the split between them and his book alpha. David
Phillips uses the terms boy scouts and pirates to divide
kind of the two broad ideological ends of the Navy Seals.
The boy Scouts are more or less the direct descendants
of the old style of UDT operator. Right, we are

(05:32):
professionals doing a really insanely dangerous job. But the job
is fundamentally there because it is supposed to save lives
in the long run.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
The pirates are cia assassins, right, we'd to kill people.
I don't give a shit, right, right, Like, I'm just
here for fucking blood. Right, That's my only interest in
anything that I'm doing. And the conflict between boy scouts
and pirates is still present today in the Navy Seals.
Right on one end are the quiet professionals, and on
the other end are the fucking maniacs and the you know,

(06:02):
the quiet professionals are always the guys who have been
in charge up until very recently. And Seal branding because
like the Seal Oath, there's a lot in there about
like part of why we train so much so that
we don't shoot civilians. You know, we can we can
target and very you know, discriminatingly only get the bad guys, right, Like,
that's why you send in the seals, is we're the
most discriminating way in order to get your man, and

(06:23):
we won't hit anyone that we don't mean to. And obviously,
like that's the branding. The reality is sometimes they're just
a lot of times they're just killing people, you know, Yeah,
because it's hard to not kill people that you don't
mean to in gun fights. Actually, when you're on speed especially,
it's a lot harder to not kill people like fights
when you're wired to the gills on speed and haven't

(06:44):
slept in four days.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yeah, but right, but even if you're one of the
good guys, like, yeah, good.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
I'm not again, I'm not trying to make an objective
moral term. I'm talking about how the people within the
unit see themselves and the breakdown the right, Like, you
don't have to think of the boy Scouts as literally
good people. That's dependent upon your own belief about ethics. Right.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
The pirates just.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Want to kill people, though, right, and they believe that
that's what the Seals are for. They're there because they're
really good at killing. We have an account by one
member of an early pirate platoon, Michael Beanan and his
platoon was a station in the Mekong Delta, and Beanan
wrote later an anonymous account of his experiences in this
unit that he published afterwards. This is how Phillips describes

(07:29):
it in the book Alpha. The job mutated from identifying
and killing Vietcong operatives to tasks like sneaking into a
village at night to assassinate a village chief and making
it look like the Vietcong had done it. When the
Intel told them to do it to Vietcong tax collectors,
they would, according to Beanan, rob them of all money
and of course kill them, and then report that all
the money was destroyed in the firefight. The money would
then be used to buy drugs and prostitutes. Beanan also

(07:51):
wrote about the obsession pirates had for close quarters blood
letting or getting wet. Per Beanan, this meant cutting somebody's
throat with your knife so the blood would go all
over you.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
It was ritual.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
His platoon leaders told him to do it to some villagers.
He refused, but said that many others did not. And
this is something I want to get into. I've been
reading a book about prehistoric warfare lately, and it includes
a lot because there was this belief that, particularly by
a lot of like European military historians in the early
part of the twentieth century, that primitive war was basically

(08:21):
playing around.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
You'd have two shides show up and they'd throw some
like weak arrows at each other, and then once a
couple of guys got injured, they'd kind of back off,
and they didn't really usually have the hunger for like
real The reality is the opposite. In fact, nearly everything
that like every basically everything that we see as like
special forces style tactics is all stuff that Europeans stole
from indigenous warriors.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Right.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
These are all like kind of rating and ambush tactics
that literally Europeans learned. They called it the skulking method
of war in the Americas, right, because they weren't they
hadn't practiced. That was not the way Europeans fought at
the time at which that was they started coming over
into the Americas. And you'll hear a lot about some
of the different because primitive warrior cultures. Number One, war

(09:02):
was often genocidal, Right, If one tribe is going, you
often wipe out the other side if you beat them
if you can because that's the thing that guarantee you
to the most safety. And there's a lot of trophy
taking all over the world. This is in Europe, this
is in Southeast Asias, in the Americas, and all sorts
of it. You know, you have scalping in some areas,
you have the taking of whole heads. There are some
cultures that would literally and these are multiple parts of
the world, take the entire skin, and in some places

(09:24):
even where the skin of a defeated enemy like a
costumes sometimes and when you read about this, it's often
pointed as like, wow, the brutality of like ancient warfare.

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Now this is just war.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
It's still the same. The US military does this. They're
taking heads in World War Two, they're taking ears in
Vietnam and other body parts. Seals are often described as
taking ears. Right, this is something that being In writes
about in his account.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Is then like.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Taking parts of bodies. And again, as a ritual, you're
supposed to cut the throat of a dude who might
is often a civilian. Right, Eddie Gallagher killing that sixteen
year old kid in Mosul, that was not a break
with tradition, That was long standing tradition within at least
a chunk of the seals according to accounts from Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
And so this is when people talk about like, oh,
you know war, you know a lot of these these
these these indigenous cultures have really brutal methods of like warfare.
And now that's just war man. That's everyone who winds
up agreeing to do the kind of warfare where you're
just like ambushing a village at night and murdering everybody,
if that's the shit you're doing, and we do that too, right,
it utilizes.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
The men who do it right.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
And if you're gonna send men to do that, you
really it's very hard to stop them from taking trophies
and cutting off and becoming very deranged by what they've done.
And throughout time and history, different cultures have built in
ways to try to provide accountability or to even there
were some ritual ways of like cleansing some some indigenous
cultures even had this understanding that like and there was

(10:52):
a ritual way to ensure that we believe the people
who go out to war is in something a different
person than they are when they're at peace, and there's
this ritual to kind of transition them back, right, and
don't We never built that into our cultures, so we
just kind of pretend these people are always like acting
like heroes as opposed to cutting off pieces of dead
enemies and murdering civilians in the woods. But they often do.

(11:15):
They often do. Beamed and described the business of the
Navy Seals in Vietnam as terrorism against Vietnamese villagers. Quote
finding a loved one with a green face and stabbed
in the middle of a road was incredible terror. In
other words, the Navy Seals would abduct someone in the night,
paint their face green because they would go intobut it
with green faces, right, and then they would stab them
and leave their corpse in the road for their families

(11:36):
to find. And after abducting the victim, they would also
often wire the door of their hut to explode, so
when their children opened it to try to like find
their dad, it would blow up, killing or maiming them,
guaranteeing further death and terror. Like that's no less like
like you, that's no less brutal than the shit people
were doing ten thousand years ago in any way, shape
or form, in any meaningful manner, right.

Speaker 3 (11:59):
Arguably because you don't have to and you're like, you
don't believe that they're going to come find you.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Right right, You are not literally in danger of your
culture being exterminated by this.

Speaker 2 (12:10):
You have no reason to be there.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
You live six thousand miles away, Like, why are you
in Vietnam. Former Seal Lieutenant Bob Carey later wrote about
a nineteen sixty nine raid he led to assassinated target
in a rural village. On the way, they encountered an
elderly man and a woman sleeping in a bedroom with
three little kids. To stop them from warning anyone else,
they killed all five with their knives. Immediately after this,

(12:33):
they fucked up and ran into a dozen women and
children out in the open, and since they lost the
element of surprise, they just gunned them all down with
automatic weapons. And their after action report they claim to
have killed twenty one Viet Cong fighters in a firefight. Yeah,
just women and children, stabbing babies to death in the
their sleep, right, and to be killed in the firefight.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah cool?

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Right now again, the first Seals are hunters and trap
of men, and they grew to worship mastery over the
killing arts. Any personal flaws were forgivable, and a truly
talented killer. One New York Times article noted that at
a seal based down range in Vietnam, operators hung a
sign above the base bar that read, people who kill
for money are professionals. People who kill for fun arsadists.

(13:18):
People who kill for money and fun are seals, right,
and reading that I couldn't have a think of when
I was in Urbill, which is in northern Iraq, it's
the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan during the fighting against ISIS
and Mosel I was sitting up in like a coffeehouse
that was like a couple floors up. It's sort of
this like Grand Bazarre area in the center of the city,

(13:38):
and there's like I noticed, like a couple of big
white dudes like milling around in this market area and
they're like, you know, they're big, muscular, covered in tattoos, bearded,
and one of them has a T shirt on that
just says I'm only here for the violence, which is
like you can find them online commonly. I don't know
if those guys were might have been some form of
fucking media, but there were probably contractors and they not

(14:00):
necessarily combat. Most of those guys were doing like drone work, right,
Like most of the contractors I met were nowhere near,
but you still saw that kind of aesthetic on them
all the time.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Right, I'm only here. It's the same thing.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
I'm only here for the violence, right Like that's that's
the same thing that that sign of that base bar says.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
Right, I'm here for the fucking violence because it's fun.
You know.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
These guys are fine.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, these guys are doing good. They're doing good.

Speaker 1 (14:27):
Richard Marsenko fit in perfectly among this crowd. As Phillips writes,
he quote went by the name Demo Dick and called
his men Marsenko's merry band of murdering marauders. Village by village,
his team destroyed rice supplies, blew up fishing boats, and
burned houses. Demo Dick liked to booby trap the bodies
of those his men had killed before they moved on
from a village. It made me feel good to hear

(14:47):
an explosion after we'd left the area, he later wrote
in his memoir. Over several deployments, Marsenko described his men
getting spookier and dirtier as they began to think more
like gorillas. He loved the free that he and his
unit were given to de vised new tactics and pick targets.
He later wrote this about Vietnam, a war that killed
close to four million people. There's something to be said

(15:09):
about the purity of a small war. For the Seals.
It was instant gratification. You would write up a patrol order,
go out there and shoot the bastard. It was black
and white, no gray, And that's the music. That's the
epitome of life for a warrior.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
And like, here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
The Seals are very kind when I talked about like
ancient prehistoric warriors and also like these kind of going
back to like a lot of these indigenous warrior cultures
that have even been around up into the modern era.
The Seals very consciously pattern themselves a lot after particularly
American Native American warriors. That's like a major thing now
but especially later in Seal culture. And so this idea

(15:46):
is really common, right that like we're there, like you know,
we're living the warrior's life and it's this perfect this
like cycle of violence where we're just constantly going out
and killing more people is.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
Exactly like that. That's the purity of what we do.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
And it doesn't nothing but lose wars as far as
I can tell, Like, if that's the idea epitome of
life is if you say what you want about the
ethics of these ancient warriors and every continent on Earth
who practiced such brutal, often genocidal tactics they had to
and they won or they died.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
This is like this is just murder cause play. That's
the thing. It's like, we're the taxpayer, are just like
paying these guys to cosplay as.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
We're like footing the bill for these psychos.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
And I guess the only yeah, yeah, completely unnecessarily and
it never works. Yeah, Like yeah, they get like our side,
like they have a lot of fun, some of them,
a lot of them get obviously very traumatized. But like
guys like Barsenko have a lot of fun. But it
doesn't work right, right, An Army intelligence analyst later called
the Phoenix program, which killed at least twenty one thousand people,

(16:51):
indiscriminate murder. In nineteen seventy one, the Navy pulled all
seals out of action and made them pass a test
on the rules of war. Right, because there's so many
reports that these guys are just murdering people. After the
Meli massacre. Mini Seals refuse to go to Vietnam entirely because,
as The New York Times reported, they were scared of
being prosecuted for war crimes that they were undeniably committing.

(17:12):
There's this A lot of them are complaining, like, oh,
after me, Lie, I don't even want to go there anymore. Right,
what's even the point if we can't fight the war
the way they'll win it? And like, you guys got
to fight that war for years and it just kept
getting worse. You lost, like they won, Vietnam won.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
Like that's the only the only tiny sliver of like again,
fucking like silver lining is like, this really doesn't work.
They like, for all the life great, you know your
comfort needs hard men kind of shit. It's like it
never has once worked.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
It doesn't it again, it does when when both sides
are like one hundred guys. If you can kill all
hundred of the other guys, then yeah, sure, like you
actually can end that problem forever. Right, But modern war
these are nations of millions and millions and millions of people.
It doesn't work that way. All you do is piss
everyone off and raise the level of brutality and anger

(18:06):
and motivate the enemy to fight and to themselves dig
in harder, Right, it does not get you what you want?

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Twenty one years later, after you know this period of time,
in nineteen ninety two, Marsenko wrote Rogue Warrior, which gave
him a chance to whitewash his own conduct in that
of the Seals entire. And before I get into that more,
I want to quote from this New York Times review
of books review for an idea of This is how
they describe his writing style. Mister Marsenko, fifty one years
old comes across as less the genuine warrior than a

(18:35):
comic book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like little
Lord Fauntleroy. To planning for his first combat assignment, he writes,
he inhaled deeply and knew instantly I was going to
like Vietnam a whole lot. He revels in the wonderful
lethal odor of cordite wafting over me and tells us
that after one particularly hair reaction, I dreamt of warm
women and cold beer. And I want to highlight something

(18:57):
I found kind of revealing here. Because Marsenko talks about
the coreite lethal odor of cordite wafting over me. You
may have heard that, especially if you read weirdly enough
warhammer books. Cordite is a kind of smokeless bullet propellant
that was developed in eighteen eighty nine. It had a
very unique scent and became famous because a lot of
Victorian earin novels of colonial British warfare loved to describe

(19:18):
the cordite stink of battlefields.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Right.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
Cordite actually stopped being produced in the mid twentieth century
and would have been out of production by the time
Marsenko was having his gunfights, and also most of the
AMMO that would have been in Vietnam was not made
by people whoever used cordite in their bullets.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Right. I'm sure he would have encountered.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
There's a lot of weird bullet types floating around Vietnam
at varying points. I'm certain he encountered chordite sometimes, but
this was definitely not like. This was something either his
ghostwriter added because it's a common thing to put in
books like this, or it's something he stuck in because
it reminded him of books that he read as a kid.
Brought out like badass colonial Warriors murdering non white people, right,

(19:58):
it's like a pulpy thing to say, yes, yes, exactly, Court,
it's not a mule recollection. Yeah, I mean honestly, it
is like basically just like an updated like Conan the
Barbarian novel.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
It's particularly funny in Warhammer books because you're like, okay,
so you're saying, forty thousand years from now, we go
back to using the shit that they decided was bunk
in the fifties.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
Really well, that is a lot of the war Heeber aesthetic,
to be fair.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does fit a little maybe.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Now.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
The combat scenes in Rogue Warrior are remarkably inaccurate, despite
being pinned by a man who undeniably saw combat with
the Seals and no. The best example of this is
a mission that occurred on March thirteenth, nineteen sixty seven.
A Seal team including Marsenko were inserted to Dung Island
on the path of a Vietcong smuggling route. This was
a free fire zone, which meant the Seals would be

(20:49):
free to kill anyone they saw out after curfew. In
Rogue Warrior, Marsenko describes the mission as them waiting to
kill a courier and recover intel. But quote, the killing
was an important element for a couple of reasons. First,
that's what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never
know whether you can kill someone until you do it.
I wanted to make sure each member of Bravo, that's
his squad, was up to the task. In other words,

(21:11):
we didn't need to kill these courriers, but I wanted
each of my guys to experience killing a human being, right,
that was the point of the mission. Really, Now this is.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Just a gang initiation or sorry, like a fiction exactly.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, but this is like just the Navy seals. Our
taxpayer dollars is fun to them.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
It's cool.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
It's cool stuff. Yeah, I love quiet professionals. Now this
is important because Marsenko goes on to claim that after
downing the courier and moving to recover his body, Bravo
unit came under heavy fire from all sides and had
to radio for extraction. That's when Lieutenant Larry Bailey, who's
a seal officer driving their boat, failed to rescue them,
and the team had to retreat under heavy fires. Bullets

(21:53):
are slicing through the bark because this lieutenant, this officer
fucks up. My men are under heavy fire and we
barely got out of there with their lives. And so
Marcinko writes that he attacks Bailey when they finally reached
the boat. I pleaded for covering fire, and you were
so goddamn far up river you were out of goddamn
radio range.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Is that bad enough for you, you pussy?

Speaker 1 (22:11):
That's what Marcinko says, that he's goals at this guy.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Now.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
The author of Code over Country actually interviews Bailey and
one other member of Marsenko's unit, and both of these
guys were like, no, Richard was lying. That's not at
all how it was heard. First off, Richard was not
on the radio. Bailey didn't hear anything. At no point
was Richard like begging to be picked up because they
weren't under fire right. In fact, Bailey eventually decided to

(22:37):
go check on Bravo himself because it was weird that
they hadn't radioed for so long. Quote as they crept inland,
I could hear some guys laughing, Bailey said. The laughing
was undimistakably American. He recalled, I could hear Marcinko hollerin
they had lost all degree of military discipline in a
supposedly hairy area. Bailey's radio man told them they'd turned
their radio off for the ambush and forgot to turn

(22:57):
it back on. After killing not a viet Cong k
but a couple of fishermen, the radio men told Bailey,
we have our first war souvenirs and pulled out a
bag filled with ID cards and a watch. Cool say,
they just killed some fishermen and they're not in any danger.
They're partying. You're just with the corpses and laughing.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
You know.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
Obviously that's saying he was never in danger. The Navy
Seals and Vietnam, I'm sure they've definitely under fire at times,
but a lot of times they're just murdering people. Paired
with the paragraph that I quoted earlier, it's clear that
Marsenko wanted his team to notch some kills, and because
it was a free fire zone, he knew that he
was safe to murder the first men he saw. This
is emblematic of his approach to war, and the Marsenko

(23:40):
approach to war. Will linger among the Navy Seals long
after he leaves the unit. But you know who never
abandons their men in the field. Me, yeah, Sophie. Sure,
but also ads podcasts huzza.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (24:07):
So I give more anecdotes of Marsenko's experiences in Vietnam,
but Richard lies about everything. It's worth noting that military
historian David Andreid looked into Marsenko's claims for Soldier of
Fortune magazine, of all publications, and I would not I don't.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
I don't tend to credit them miss being a particularly
credible Uh.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
But that's the other way I look at it is
if fucking Soldier of Fortune is like.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Fashion, we should check the shit out. Yeah, you are
a liar.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Andreid publishes an article called Pogue Warrior about him, and
pogue is military slang for like a soldier in like
the back, like a soldier who's like stationed far back
from the line of contact. He doesn't actually do anything,
but who like lies about having done cool. Sure, right,
Like that's what a pogue is. That's it's it's a
pretty funny title for the article. Here's Cole's to description

(25:00):
of the article. The article also found another instance from
Arsenko's book in which he grossly mischaracterized what was supposed
to be a seminal event in his military career, losing
his first seal in battle, and appeared to outright fabricate
a scene in Vietnam. And there's something important for people
to we who weren't in the military and haven't seen
combat to understand, which is, like, I think people are
generally familiar with the idea that someone would lie about

(25:21):
having served for like clout right or that event, who
never did anything cool might lie about having seen combat.
But if you can confirm that someone's like a combat veteran,
people don't tend to assume that they would lie about
what they saw in combat. And the reality is that
happens all the time. Guys who've seen heavy combat often
lie about it, in part because it's very common, especially

(25:44):
in repeated combat actions, for even people who are trained
and experienced to fuck up and panic under fire and
screw up in situations that like they have to lie
about to themselves and everyone else because it's the only
way they can go on emotionally.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
I've like, yeah, it happens anyway.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
So remember that, both with Dick and anytime you see
someone telling like war stories that seem like really crazy.
I'll never forget a buddy of mine who was in
a combat unit and saw a lot of combat. We
were driving in like near the base in or one
of the bases in southern California outside of San Diego,
and there's like a road named for some Medal of
honor winner, and I asked him, like what the guy did?

(26:24):
And he was like, oh, I don't really pay much
attention because it's one of those like loan Survivor stories,
and I don't trust anyone who won an award, and
it is like the only guy who survived, Like anyone
doing that is probably.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Lying about what happened.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
I think that's generally a smart way to approach those stories,
especially the story of Navy Seal Marcus Latrell, who wrote
the book Loan Survivor, which is an account of him
being the only survivor for unit that we know is
largely inaccurate. Right, fun stuff. So Dick starts that tradition
of being a fantasist and a huge braggart while also

(26:57):
like having actual qualifications that make it very difficult for
most people to kind of argue with you or deny
what you did. Right, But he's also like he's also
someone who does have a lot of popularity in the unit.
A lot of guys, particularly in the pirate end of
the Seals, really like him. As or Kelly writes in
his book, quote, men who served under him in Vietnam

(27:20):
say they would follow him anywhere. These, however, are the pirates.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Again.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Other seals described him as a boastful bragger. So it's
it's it's not like universal, but he is popular within
the popular with the worst guys, which yes, and that's
not a small number of them, right. That's kind of
an important thing is that he is hated by a
lot of Seals, but he's liked by a.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
Lot of them.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
When the war ended, he remained in the now shrunken
Navy Seals, and he spent the next decade watching the
military he loved languish in post Vietnam peacetime outside of
a war zone. His behavior made more waves among his peers.
Per the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, quote, he had
away with people that permitted him to get away with
behavior that has one friend's would get me killed. He

(28:01):
casually called strangers by racial epithets and got a smile
in return. Rear Admiral George Worthington, who succeeded marsinco as
naval lettache in Cambodia in the mid nineteen seventies, recalls
a reception for General lawn Nan, brother of lawn Nole,
who had been president of the country. Marsenko was well loved,
if not revered, by the Cambodian officer corps and the
troops too. He had a sort of Lawrence of Arabia

(28:22):
esque leadership quality about him. Worthington says, Marsino had never
laid an eye on Lawnnon, but he walks up behind
him and grabs him with a big bear hug, and
the guy loved it. And again that's also very telling
because the Cambodians he talked, he's talking about are the
guys who lost to the Khmer rouge. So he trained
the military that lost. Yeah, yeah, I mean, is this

(28:45):
becoming a pattern?

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Yeah, that's yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
That's how we roll, That's how we roll in the seals.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
He trained the brutal, authoritarian military that's war crimes so
enraged rural Cambodians that it provided fuel for the Khmer roote.
So at one point in the nineteen seventies, Dick panicked
a top Navy officer during a visit to the Pentagon
when the officer noted that Marsinko had a pistol stuffed

(29:12):
in his sock. Now, let me tell you something about
carrying a gun, folks. You got two, broadly speaking, two
ways to carry a gun. One is just the firearm itself,
either loaded or unloaded, but without a round in the chamber. Right,
a gun can be loaded and not have a round
in the chamber. That means you've got a mag in.
But there's not like if you pull the trigger, it's
not going to immediately fire a bullet.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
You have to cock it basically, or you have to
charge it, is the term in order to get a
bullet in there.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
The other way to carry it is with around in
the chamber. Now, most good holsters are like made out
of us and they didn't really do that with holsters
back then. But ideally your holster is made out of
a rigid plastic material, so there's something hard in between
the trigger and the rest of the world, so that
if you carry with a gun with a bullet in
the chamber, something can't just like poke the trigger and

(30:01):
make it fire.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Two things.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
I'm gonna assume Richard Marsenko never carried a gun without
a round in the chamber, So I'm going to guess
he's just got a chambered hot pistol with no safety,
shoved in a sock, with nothing between that.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
Trigger and the world around it but a sock.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
And I think that's beautiful. I think that's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Or adds that quote.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Another officer invited Marsenko to present a briefing at the
Pentagon and then called the session off because he was
so embarrassed by Marsenko's flamboyant profanity. Now this is evident
in the book Rogue Warrior. Richard's favorite word is cock breath,
which he uses eleven times in his autobiography.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
I don't know if it's been used more in a book,
but I probably not right or weird guy.

Speaker 1 (30:51):
Yeah, you'd have to try. At one point, he calls
his own men positively Mary murdering cock breath shit for
brain's asshole. At another he claims to have shouted down
a higher ranking officer who graduated from the Naval Academy
and at admiral relatives, saying fuck you and all your
fucking kind you sorry shit for brain's cock bread pencil

(31:11):
Dick numbnuts, asshole.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Fun. I know it's a different era, but yeah, you.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
Know what I'll say here is like there's a way
to do that suit you a But like Ari Eirmley
had a fucking horrible politics. That's like the drill sergeant
from a full metal jacket, right, but he was at
least really good at creatively cursing and dressing people down.
Richard is not right, Like, it's a lot of the
same insults eat it and they're not very creative. The

(31:41):
bleakest moment of Maarsenko's career before the end came in
nineteen eighty when Jimmy Carter had US Special Force his
attempt to rescue prisoners of the American embassy who were
trapped in Iran. This is a very famous failure. And
this is why I say, like, you know, US Special
Forces until the modern era had a much more mixed reputation,
And this is a this is a Delta Force operation,

(32:02):
so it's not Seals. On the day of the mission,
Dick was almost forty. He was a Navy commander assigned
to represent the Seals at the Pentagon, so he had
a front row seat for the disastrous attempt by Delta Force,
which is at that point the pre eminent special forces
unit in the country, way more elite than the Seals,
to save the hostages, and the whole event was a clusterfuck.

(32:22):
One chopper hit a C one thirty while refueling, which
caused an explosive crash, and the Delta operators bailed in time,
but three Marines and a helicopter died, along with five
Air Force crew. The whole affair was a calamity for
the special Forces community as well as the Carter. A
lot of people will say this is why Carter lost. Yeah, right,
and it's definitely part of why Carter lost, and.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
You know, not to do too much history, that is
arguably why we're at the position we're in now.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Arguably why we're in the position we're in now because
Delta Force couldn't get their fucking well. I guess this
is more on the air the pilot guys, but yeah, yeah,
So as a result of this horrible cluster fuck, Jimmy
first off, Carter calls for an immediate follow up attempt,
but he also calls for like the Pentagon, to reform
the way their special Forces unit works, and as a
result of this, the Pentagon decides to form the Joint

(33:12):
Special Operations Command or JAYSOCK to coordinate between different special
forces teams directly.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
For the president. This is the birth.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
Weirdly enough, it comes from Jimmy Carter. You can trace
the birth of special forces not being well. These are
units that are part of the Navy, part of the army,
and they help with these special tasks to the most
elite of these units are like the president's direct guy, right,
this is the president's goon squad.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
Ye, Carter really does start that in a lot of ways.
I mean, this has been happening before him, but he's
a major part of that. Actually, he was horrified, I'm
sure by like where this led. He was trying to
rescue some hostages. But that is kind of part of
what leads us where we get or where we are today.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
Well, it's also sort of why, like, you can't be
the American president, no matter who you are, without being
at minimum of war criminal.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Right, You're going to be party to some horrible things
as the president, and the very best case scenarios of
like the most ethical guy in that job, you can imagine,
which probably was carter like he probably in terms of
like trying to be ethical, you know, not this again.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
He did a lot of there's a lot of critiques
of course.

Speaker 3 (34:21):
Grading on the presidential curve. Yeah, he simply has to
be the top.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
He's got he's got to be the guy who cared
the most, right.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:30):
So Jaysock is formed to coordinate between these different special
forces teams for the President, and Marsenko is tasked with
building the Navy contribution to Jaysock, right. And this proves
something else important about Marsenco, which is that he's very
good at making the right friends. And for all of
his hate of like officers and politics and all these
connected people he describes as like the whole problem with

(34:51):
big Navy, he's great at politics. He's a political animal.
He's really good at interfacing as an officer in a
political way in order to get what he wants.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
He's great at selling his ideas to command. It's a
legitimate skill he has. Marsenko lays out and sells to
them his vision of a new seal team with its
own commanding officer and six platoons dedicated to counter terrorist
missions and hostage rescue missions. To make his dream team,
marsinco would have to reach over the heads of his
fellow Special Forces officers to steal their very best men.

(35:23):
In the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, or Kelly writes
that Marsenko was armed with a pri one Priority one
that permitted him to take the men and equipment he
needed to from other commands. So he starts grabbing the
guys he wants from these other Special Forces units, and
by September of nineteen eighty Marsinko was commander of an
entirely new unit, which he named Seal Team six. This

(35:45):
is where that starts, and this forms an important part
of team war which you had brought up, Right, How
are the five? Were there five other Seal teams at
this point? There were still just two. The name initially, though,
referred to the fact that there had been six Seal
platoons that had taken counter terrorism training. Right, So Seal
Team six is made up of six platoons that had
taken the specialized training, So that's why they start with

(36:08):
the name. But because there's only two other Seal teams,
Marsinko decides he really likes the idea of naming them
Seal Team six is a disinformation tactic to trick the Bobbies,
so they think there's more seals than there are. Right,
that may have been something after the fact. I kind
of think it was just because they trained six platoons
and then after we said, oh this is clever, right,

(36:28):
you know, but I don't, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
Yeah, and the children where it's like, you know, at
fourteen year old year old Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
Yeah, we're ruled by violent, violent fourteen year old boys. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Like, here's the thing about testosterone. It has its uses,
but it it One thing it can do is stop
you from ever growing past age fourteen. Yeah, you really
have to fight that part of the effect. So in
an article for Rolling Stone, Matthew Cole notes Marcinko sought
men who, in his estimation, would otherwise be athletes or

(37:05):
criminals in the civilian world. He wanted seals who had
combat experience, he later said in an interview, who had
a bullet go past their head with their name on it.
Marsenko wanted men who were adept at all the traditional
seal skills shooting, underwater diving, skydiving, mountain climbing, but who
also had or could develop tradesman life skills. These men
had to engineer solutions to any problems standing in their
way to mission success, whether it required manufacturing a quieter

(37:27):
piece of equipment or conceiving a quieter method for building entry. Right,
And that's very telling. But this is also not just Marsenko.
If you remember when the Seals were formed, there was
some talk of like, I want them to be rogues,
and he's now taking that a step forward. Do I
want guys Seal Team six guys who could have only
been pro athletes or criminals? Right, that's Marsenko's idea, right now,

(37:49):
there's a lot of sense to this. Actually, you know,
the whole criminal thing is going to cause problems immediately,
but if you want to form a unit of dudes
who can solve serious problems using out of the box
on the fly, it does make sense.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
To recruit guys like this.

Speaker 1 (38:04):
You know, criminal cartels and gangs are famously creative.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Yet done, they can get shit done. Yeah yeah, yeah.
The outsides are they're not They're not the type of
people you want to do this. You can find other
creative people. I guess is what I would say, you.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Probably want to make more of these people in any
society and give them like guns and the right to
do whatever they want. That might be a bad idea,
but you know this also does work really well in
certain ways. It's a great way to a lot of
like innovative combat tactics and like operate special operations tactics
are created by these Team six guys because they're just

(38:46):
kind of given freedom to do whatever they want and
a bunch of money to explore and make gear and
try new stuff. Right, So there's aspects of what Marsinko
does that are a really good idea, And I don't
want to pretend like that's not the case, but Richard's
good ideas are always married with his bad ones. For example,
Dick is a hardcore alcoholic in nineteen eighty and since

(39:07):
he considered himself the.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
I'm so shocked to hear this, wow.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Still an alcoholic wow, And since he considered himself the
best operator ever, obviously any man who might hope to
be his equal would have to drink at least as
much as he did. So membership in Sealed Team six
was thus mostly restricted to alcoholics.

Speaker 2 (39:28):
The New York Times, He's fucking Stalin what is happening? Yeah,
we need to you know, what we really need.

Speaker 1 (39:34):
And this team, full of heavily armed badasses who are
unaccountable to any laws, is drinking problems.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
That's gotta be key.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
I want these guys to be hungover or hammered one
hundred percent of the time. The New York Times confirmed
that his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats and bars.
One team member told Or that when he came for
a seven am interview, Marcinko offered him a beer and
said you might not fit in. When he declined, he
did ultimately admit the man, but one of Marsenko's officers

(40:02):
admitted to be with him, you had to drink to
be in the in crowd. I drink when I want
to drink. This went against the grain, and when he
was interviewed by Or for the book Brave Men, Dark Waters,
Maarsenco didn't even try to deny this. Instead, he wrote
Or a letter explaining his alcohol preferences, especially Gin Bombay
team members East Coast weaned on rum coke at Saint

(40:23):
Thomas during Animal Annual winter training. I polished these skills
in atache A training and inverted it and converted to gin.
Gin is powerful, but my safest drink. I can consume more.
It demoralizes the opponent drinking mixed drinks or slurring while
I casually rant and rave. I do play head games.
I use booze as a tool. It's very telling too
that like people he's drinking with are his opponents that

(40:44):
he wants to demoralize.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
He's like, that's not how I drink. He's like, I'm
not like the others. Gin and bombay.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
Alcohol is a tool that I use tactically to defeat
my enemies who are also my men.

Speaker 3 (40:57):
Yeah, you're employee cool.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
I mean you're at least it's like, I mean they're
they're there.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
If their only job is a commit war crimes, at
least they're sluggish and hungover. Sometimes at least they're fucking drunk.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, this has going to cost some issues too. To
justify his selections to command, Marcinco hired a psychologist to
evaluate his picks and rubber stamp them. Per an interview
he gave to Cole, it was a fallacy. We were normal.
According to me. If I was fucked up, then we
were all fucked up. Also true, that's true. He also

(41:29):
towed Cole this, if you want to call them sociopaths,
you can. That's how you get the enlisted in charge.
They are the talent. So if you want the enlisted
to be in charge, if you want the talented you'd like,
you have to cater to sociopaths. That's who you're looking
for in this job. He's very direct about it. Concentrating
this specific group of men and giving them unlimited funding

(41:50):
for weapons and training resulted in the creation of a
uniquely skilled group of soldiers. And to give you an
idea of the kind of proficiency these guys developed, Marsinko's
Seal Team six fire more rounds training in their first
six months of existence than the entire United States Marine
Corps used in training for a whole year. Yeah, that's

(42:10):
how much these guys are practicing.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
They are really good with guns.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
Marsenko saw his men as artisans of violence, and a
shoot house was built to practice for incredibly niche hostage
rescue situations. That's the idea is, we're going to be
We need these guys to be able in order to
avoid killing, you know, the hostages and what rather than whatnot,
they have to be able to develop these skills. Now,
does Marcinko ever really care about avoiding civilian casualties? Is
that ever a priority of Team six? Highly debatable? But

(42:39):
that's how they're build, right, That's how they're sold to command.
That's why he's able to claim this is necessary. I
need this many bullets the only way to develop the
skills they need to do the kind of job that
we have.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
I mean, it's also probably a lie you could pretty
easily tell yourself. I mean, why else would you? You know,
you do have to live with yourself.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
Yeah, and that's also nobody wants to think of Most
people don't want I think in themselves.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
It's just like murderers, right, yeah, but you know who
are just murderers? No?

Speaker 1 (43:05):
No, no, okay, well don't think about that. Just think
about these ads.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (43:18):
And Sophie has informed me that none of our sponsors
are ruthless murderers.

Speaker 3 (43:23):
I did not.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
I did not, especially.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Especially if the Washington State Patrol ads are the police.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
As just ran, I cannot.

Speaker 3 (43:33):
I cannot vouch for all of our sponsors because I
have no idea who they are.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
But that's the level of trust you have in them.
That's the level of trust. Mean, they could be anybody.
They could be anybody. Hitler could be running an ad
I would have no way of knowing. Literally.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Seals also trained for high altitude insertion and every other
cool thing they could find someone to teach them. Marcinko
had been made a commander by this point, which put
him above most of the other Seal officers and ensured
he pretty much always got what he wanted. He's received
a lot of praise down on down the years for
his creation, but even in the early days of Team six,
other Seal officers looked at what he was building with

(44:09):
worry and brave men dark Waters or quotes one of
these officers. You get a bunch of people, smart, strong, aggressive,
and you require them to kill other people. You are
requiring guys to do some really tough things. They are
going to go in and find that terrorists are women,
terrorists or children, anybody. You're up close. This is very personal.
The psychologist looks at whether you can blow a hole

(44:30):
in a man two feet away and watch his brains
come out the other side of his head, and do it.
You give them this training I'm talking about concentrating year
after year on parachuting, making guns, sniper shooting, scaling mountains, swimming, diving.
You give them all this training and require them to
kill people, not from one hundred yards away, not from
two hundred yards away, not from thirty thousand feet with
a bomb, but from three feet away. Can you imagine

(44:50):
that group of people together, all of a sudden, In
that group of one hundred and fifty or two hundred
men who are so highly trained, all keyed up, and
required to do such hazardous things, you are going to
find some amorl people. They're there because they're smart and aggressive,
and they have no morals. You have guys who have
no morals will do anything. That's how you get a
reputation for being really bad. But the great majority are

(45:11):
really dedicated, straight, hard working people. The reason the a
moral man doesn't get his way more is that a
lot of people watch him. He is controlled. But you
are going to find that kind of person when you
have a group of people required to perform with These
people are required to perform right, And I might argue
that the great majority are hardworking, moral people. It depends
you know. Some seal units do abide by the rules

(45:33):
of engagement and don't commit war crimes constantly, and some don't.
It does tend seem to depend on like the ratio
of the pirates to the boy Scouts guide of end
them at the time or whatever. But he's making a
good point, right that as much as we want to
condemn and should condemn arcinco and individual and Navy seal
guys who commit war crimes, all of their crimes are

(45:55):
inevitable by their existence. You can't have these guys and
have them. We can't have any group of guys who
are trained to do this and supposed to do the
kind of shit that we send Navy seale to do,
who don't turn into this. It can't be done.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
It's a consequence. Yeah, yeah, consequence. It's brutalizing.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
You can try to minimize some things, right, There is
more that certainly should be done to control and punish.
You can punish certainly when they commit war crimes, to
try to make it less common. But this is always
going to be a problem when you're concentrating the most
violent and skilled men together in saying like we want
you to commit a bunch of murder for the government, right,

(46:35):
good people don't want to do that. Job all that often,
and if they are good people when they start, they
don't stay that way long because they're shooting people in
the head from three feet away every day. It's bad
for you to do that. Yeah, you have to be
a bad person after a period of time. It fucks
you up in pretty profound ways.

Speaker 3 (46:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
Another officer told or that when Marsenko came to him
to recruit from his youth, he was surprised that he
took not the best performers, but quote uniformly, the scum.
The fact that these guys had so much attention and
resources lavished on them certainly bred jealousy. In a mixed reputation,
Team six guys could both get called Jedi by other
Seals and, per another Seal officer, a paramilitary fitness club. Still,

(47:21):
the officer who called him a fitness club wanted to
join Team six because they got all of the best
gear and all of the best missions, and they also
had no real oversight. At one point during the early
nineteen eighties, Marsenko build the government for lodging his entire
command in Washington, d C. It was later found that
the hotel he built never existed, and the Seals had

(47:41):
bunked on a yacht and the Potomac owned by a
buddy of Marsenco or something like that, and he'd just
taken the money, he'd build the navy. And he did
this all the time. This is normal standard operating procedure
for Richard Barzenko. We know he engaged in similar acts
of financial fraud at least thirty seven times during the
three years he led Seal Team six, So about once

(48:02):
a month, he's doing this like monthly. This is like
very common for him. Nobody notices at first. Marsinko's a
rising star, and it's widely agreed that he had accomplished
something great in getting one hundred man special forces team
up and running in just three months. Within a year
or so of Team six's creation. Many insiders regarded Seal
Team six as being as good as Delta Force, if

(48:23):
not better, But the skill they exhibited was displayed alongside
their faults, including a team wide pinchant for apocalyptic drinking.
Team six guys from the jump get in trouble for
starting fights for like like being just incredibly violent, rowdy
drunks and causing problems everywhere they.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Fucking go, right, I mean, but that's the problem. Yeah,
it's just that that then the mythology for like the
you know people is like, oh, we we got at
least the vikings are on our side. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
It's just like it's like, yeah, but is that really
necessary to modern war?

Speaker 2 (49:03):
We actively don't.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
I think so.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
I think this might be a detriment on the whole.
Marsinco clearly saw this as more evidence that he was
the good kind of officer, writing, I played havoc with
their system. I treated my lowest drinking seamen with more
respect than I did most captains and commodorees. I ate
and drank with my enlisted men in chiefs. I threw
loud parties. I said fuck to flag rank officers. I

(49:27):
said fuck, I'm cool. Yeah, okay, okay, Richard, okay, man,
we get it, buddy. Now there are good reasons Marsinko
was a legend to many of his operators during his time.
Marsinko hurt his leg training overseas and decided he could
manage well enough that he just kept working on it
because he didn't want to take medical leave, and he
avoided the doctor until seventeen months later he was diagnosed

(49:49):
with a broken Lake such a moron, and again, yeah,
it's really dumb because he had to get at that point,
it was so bad that he had he had to
get a special procedure his fucking military healthcare wouldn't cover,
and he had to borrow money from one of his
enlisted men in order to get like a sports medical
procedure done on himself because he was such a difficual.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (50:11):
Now, Marsenko's problems with the Navy began when Lieutenant William McRaven,
and that's the guy who was running the Seals by
the way, when Bin Lanen gets killed, was transferred to
Team six as an officer. Now, McRaven comes from Navy royalty,
and so Marsenko hated him immediately. For his part, McRaven
was a by the book officer and seems to have
been one of like the boy scout side of things.

(50:33):
And as soon as he gets into Team six he
notices a bunch of irregularities and part of I should
note here Marsinko has his pick of enlisted men officers
are assigned.

Speaker 2 (50:43):
To Team six.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
So a lot of his conflicts come with the officers
because he doesn't get to pick them right. They are
not his chosen guys in other words, right, so only.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
There to either be like jumped in or to knark
on him.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
Yeah, right, exactly exactly. And mcgraven on him because he
notices a bunch of irregularities and how operators are filing
their travel vouchers, and he complains to his superior officer,
who says an x in essence like, hey, dude, don't
ruin this for us, Like we got a good thing
going here, right, And so this guy then tosses mcraven's
gear out of their cabin and when they get back

(51:17):
from training, Marsenco fires McRaven. Decades later, he still claimed
the man had been sent to Team six as an infiltrader.
McRaven got his running orders from the West Coast something uh,
Marsinco writes, right that this guy he was a spy
sent by the West Coast Seals. He infiltrade by elite
East Coast unit because they hated me.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
This is it is. It is telling that, like like
all things in a petty criminal enterprise, there's East Coast
West Coast beef.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
That's right, that's right. He is the biggie in this one.
And I guess McRaven is.

Speaker 2 (51:47):
Tupac, I don't. Yeah, that's the same, right actually, but.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Okay, well they all said the N word just about
the same amount, just to a real different tone.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Marcinko sure does. I don't know McRaven, but Marsenko for
sure done.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
Yeah. I feel pretty confident about that one too.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
Uh. In Code over Country, Cole gives a good explanation
of how many other seal officers and outside Navy officers
saw this as having as Marcinko having upended the chain
of command and sent a signal to his men that
no officer beside Dick mattered. He credits this with the
decision senior officers in the Naval Special Warfare Division made
a few months later, which was to replace Richard Barsenko. Right, So,

(52:30):
his total period of time commanding Team six after forming
it is like three years, and they never, like I
don't think they really do much while he's like they're training,
they're getting up to speed, like he's not there for
any of like the shit that makes them famous. But
he leaves a mark that pretty much universally agreed to
still affect the unit to this day. The officer who
replaced Marsenko Captain Robert Gormley found the unit in awful shape.

(52:54):
He found that Marsenko had quote constantly misled his superiors
in the chain of command under the guise of operational
secuitre ready right. In other words, he lied in order
to like steal from the Navy, and said that the
reason why he had to lie was op sack. Yeah,
can't file accurate finance reports because like I, I the
commis might find out that I'm stealing money to buy drugs.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
And Richard is alleged to have had a pretty serious
cocaine problem. A lot of Team six guys are alleged to.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
Have had pretty serious cocaine problems that they were stealing
from the Navy. Yeah, you know what happens a decent
amount up to the present day is Special Forces guys,
particularly at Fort Braggs selling military weapons to criminals for
money to buy drugs. Anyway, cool stuff. That's not a
Team six thing, but it's just good time saying, just a.

Speaker 3 (53:41):
Thing that we all pay for. Yeah, why do we
pay taxes? Again?

Speaker 2 (53:45):
This is crazy?

Speaker 1 (53:46):
You know, I love paying taxes and knowing that it
goes to this shit. Gormley also found widespread alcoholism among
the team to be a serious problem. He wrote, Dick
insisted upon everyone drinking with him whenever he wanted, and
as long as he wanted. On exercises, they seldom finished
the entire scenario because as soon as things got tough,
Dick would step in, abort the exercise and take the

(54:07):
troops drinking. And so, in Gormley's view, like yeah, the
Seals like Team six did some cool training stuff, but
also they weren't very as good as they could have
been because mar Singo didn't really care about training.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
As much as he cared about drinking. After a point,
like he's ending X, fuck it, fuck it, let's just
go drink.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Nah. Right, you guys done it enough? Come on.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Yeah, And you see this kind of casual attitude to
the things that are supposed to be serious. Then Eddie
Gallagher is accused of like one of the first weird
signs some of his younger unit mates got is during
training before they headed over to Iraq, when they would
like do the shoot houses, he would just be shooting
the civilian targets that he wasn't supposed to hit and
like joke about it, like aha, yeah, it's funny, you know,
Like yeah, and people would be like, but you're not.

(54:49):
You have to doesn't he have to pass training? And
he would just like clear it with his friends, so
he didn't have to actually pass, like because he didn't
care about not hitting civilians, you know.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
Right, Allegedly this is this is what some guy I
wasn't there. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
I'm not nave of Zeel. I'm just saying what some
guys said to another guy who wrote a book. You know,
a book called Alpha, very good. You should read it.
So despite the praise that Marsenko gets for creating a
team with unique skills, he likely had the very low
operational tempo of the early eighties to thank for the
fact that his men were never tested too hard while
he was in command. His last IRAQ came in June
of nineteen eighty three, when he invited Gormley to drink

(55:24):
with the unit on Virginia Beach. It was an awkward night.
The operators were insubordinate to Gormley, so he left, but
marsinco kept drinking. As Cole writes, Marsenko decided to continue
drinking elsewhere. He had a command aid drive him in
a modified Mercedes Ben Sedan one of three he had
custom built and shipped to the United States, which he
frequently used as his personal car. That night, Marsinko's driver

(55:47):
fell asleep in the early morning hours and rear ended
another car, causing significant damage to both vehicles.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
I would just say, warrior, great.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
This type of guy always drives the Dictator Mercedes like
kind of across any.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
Only car they want.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
It's the only car they want, right, Yeah, the Dictator
Mercedes is a true human universal Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
It's so wild, Yeah it is.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
It is kind of beautiful. We're all really the same
deep down, even our psychopaths.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Every culture, every culture, every culture.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
After aout, you know, as soon as Mercedes were around,
there was a psycho.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Who oh, this is a psycho asshole car, a.

Speaker 3 (56:27):
Cult of personality, of violent culture personality got driven around it.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Yeah mmmm yeah. It's just like if you show up
drunk to a car dealership, they don't even ask. They
hand you the keys to a Dodge.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Ram, right.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
Yeah, we'll figure out the financing later. You need to
be driving this twenty five hundred this.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
Night for you.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
Yeah, get on the road immediately.

Speaker 1 (56:50):
So, in true Dick fashion, he ordered his staff not
to report the accident, but they refuse to cover it
up because again he's about to leave, So like, I'm
not going to commit a crime for you, You're out
the door. And this says a lot.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
Macinco.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
A big part of what he establishes in Team six
is loyalty. That's part of like the Team six, you know,
the oath the Seals take, and the way Marsinko establishes
this is like, you don't rat on your boss, on
your your fellow guys if they commit crimes, if they're stealing.
We're a wall. We don't talk to anybody. We don't
talk to big Navy, we don't talk to the NCIS investigators,

(57:23):
we don't do any of that stuff because we're a
loyal warrior brotherhood. Richard talks about that all the time.
As soon as he gets sent to a captain's mast,
he rolls on his driver and blames him for the accident. Yeah,
so he gets a slap on the wrist for this.
Anyone else in Dick's position would have been forced into

(57:44):
early retirement. But such was the awe with which Marsenko's
rogue warrior pirate personality was held by some Navy admirals
that he was given another chance to create another elite unit,
this time with even less oversight. He gets the same
job again after doing it, how because people just think
he's cool.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Yeah, because because people's brains are poisoned by like fucking you.
Because again, like, oh, you need dirty men to protect
you know, your fucking life. That's like sort of sounds
good when it's dirty, Harry, I guess yeah, but like
what the fuck are you talking about? But whatever, this
is how we run our world.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Well, what were those shirts you saw, Robert, I'm just.

Speaker 1 (58:28):
I'm only here for the violence. Yeah, And and fucking
Marsenco talks all the time about like these big these
admirals who come from these admiral families and they but
those are a lot of his big backers too. There
are admirals that love him, and they're usually guys who like,
didn't do anything all that cool, but like they they
really buy into everything. Marcinko says, right, well.

Speaker 3 (58:48):
But that's the sing.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
He doesn't hate officers for real.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
He just needs he hates accountability, a cudgel with which
to beat office, you know, like, oh, oh yeah, I
thought you were cool.

Speaker 1 (58:59):
Yeah, he needs an excuse for like why people are
always giving him shit for like fucking up constantly. And
it's because these officers don't understand what real warriors do.
And it's like, well, real warriors don't need to like
steal money from the government and ram their fucking Mercedes
into the back of a civilian's car because they got drunk.
That's not really key to the war fighter ethos. I
don't think this is going to help the US win anywhere.

(59:21):
Your lord, shit, it's yeah, it's war lord shit. It's
not like a soldier in a democratic nation. Shit. I
mean it is, yeah, I mean objective, but it shouldn't.

Speaker 3 (59:31):
It shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
Uh. Marsenko was initially transferred to teach at the National
War College, but he got lucky. On October twenty third,
nineteen eighty three, a truck loaded with T and T
was detonated outside of a Marine barracks in Beirut and
killed two hundred and forty one Americans. Admiral Lyons, who's
one of his biggest backer in the Navy, who's the
Vice Chief of Naval Operations, suggested that the Navy create

(59:53):
a special team to test security in their facilities and says,
I know the guy for the job, right, right, So Dick,
is it dear old Dick.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
It's Dearald Dick.

Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
Yeah, it's always it's always like it's the problem is
that it's just always some like it's so crazy it
just might work shit, Like people think that's like real.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Well, I mean there's an element that it is. There
are real things called red teams that exist to this
day and everything from like actual like military operational security
to like like a corporation will hire a red team
to see like is our website secure? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Yeah, right, like that is like a thing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
You do want to do this, right, but you don't
necessarily need them to be completely immune to like all laws.
That's not necessary, right, But Dick argues, in order to
really be able to work like the enemy, we have
to be completely classified and completely free from any kind
of oversight, right because the enemy is not gonna there

(01:00:52):
won't be oversight of the enemy. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
So if you want me to know do what the
enemy could, you have to give me this kind of freedom.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:58):
It's also red This is play acting, motherfucker.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
Yeah, well your cause playing now you're not even in danger. Well,
actually he is going to wind up endangering his men
somehow in this job. So the Red Cell is an
super classified unit that was tasked with breaking into US
military facilities and even kidnapping officers and civilian employees to
demonstrate weaknesses and security protocols. They are kidnapping people now.

(01:01:27):
Depending on who you ask, Richard was either very good
at this or deeply irresponsible to the extent of criminality.
Dick's ultimate plan was to carry out mock terror attacks
on fifty bases, spending one hundred and twenty five thousand
dollars per attack. Advanced warning was given so these the
officers at these bases and the security people knew that,
like there's going to be an exercise, but you won't

(01:01:48):
know the form it takes. Right, And when Marsenko told
showed up to explain what was going to happen to them,
he tried to psyche them out. His job was to
scare these people, and he took a lot of pleasure
in that, and recalled. He'd go into a briefing and say,
we won't break any skin, we won't draw any blood,
no broken teeth, everything else is mine. He would tell women,
we're not going to pull the skirt over your head

(01:02:10):
and tie your hands behind your back. He wanted to
get attention. He enjoyed twisting tails. Right, you don't like
tell women in an office, don't worry, We're not going
to rip your clothes off and bind intact if you
don't want them to think that that might happen. It's
like a weird thing to say if you're not trying
to scare people. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
It's also, yeah, what what is this? Fucking right? It
accomplishes he gets to do his thing.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Of course, again the basic idea of sure, you want
some guys to test, and that's aspects of this need
to happen, but not the way he is going to
do it. He also saw the Red Cell as his
chance to get revenge on the Poindexter. She'd screwed him
out of Team six, so he made sure to recruit
his best guys there from Team six for the Red Cell,
along with some of the best dudes from other teams.

(01:02:55):
Since his new unit was classified, he basically had Team
six sign for everything he wanted to buy and wound
up purchasing enough gear to operate multiple full seal teams.
Now again, these guys don't need guns, but he's buying
tons of them. He's buy it because his hope is
that once he's exposed all the security flaws and the
regular Navy that big Navy doesn't want them to think about,

(01:03:17):
he'll be so beloved they'll make his team the near
tier one guy right right. They'll be like, Wow, we
really need your guy. We have to send you on
special missions. Now you're so good.

Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
You've proved that we really need you. Richard, Like this
is like some.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
Very suckercorn shit. He's supposed to just sew it in
and like tag someone with a NERF gun and just
be like, could have been this could have been bad.

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
Bro, it's gonna said, it's so much worse than that.
So one of his first actions was to chat test
security at the Charleston Navy Base and Brave Men Dark
Waters or Kelly describes Marsinko's team as showing up to
areas that stored nuclear weapons quote, dressed in scroungy clothes, unshaven,
and with long hair, and that they spent several days

(01:03:58):
rummaging about, through which they were never challenged. And so
he's able to show that like, yeah, we just had
some guys like show up in this nuclear facility looking
like shit, and nobody like asked what they were doing
there or tried to like stop them from rooting around.
So this is kind of his proof of concept, right,
and it does probably show a real security Like this
is the fucking post Vietnam US military. I have no

(01:04:18):
trouble believing that he did, in fact find security with shit,
and so the fact that they prove that, like where
our operators were able to get this close to nuclear
weapons right without even trying is what secures him the job.
And so from this point forward, Richard Marsinko was in
charge of yet another elite, unaccountable military unit. So we'll
talk about what happens with the Red Cell, and we'll

(01:04:39):
talk about what happens to the Navy Seals and Team
six after that next week.

Speaker 2 (01:04:43):
How are you doing?

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
How are you feeling, Andrew?

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
Good?

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):
God? I mean, the only thing that makes it not
as bleak is like, I guess life has more or
less functioned with these fuckers roaming around. Sure not well,
but yeah, yeah, but right, every every second of this
is infuriating. Obviously, there's there's so much.

Speaker 1 (01:05:05):
Among other things, like one of the worst cartels in
Mexico was formed from Mexican Special Forces guys who were
trained by like US green Berets and then took that
training in order to like make a cartel that worked
really well. And it's very common by the way, even
in the US for like cartel and like people who
are running large criminal enterprises to recruit from former Special

(01:05:28):
and current Special Forces guys, including Delta guys.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
This has the case of this.

Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
It's like it's the private sector version of this public
sector thing. It's the same job.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Some of them go into fucking you know Blackwater, and
I mean the modern equivalent of Blackwater, and yeah, some
of them worked for a fucking cartel.

Speaker 2 (01:05:45):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
It's not everyone who gets out of that, but it's
not none. Yeah, and it's it's probably it's the same job.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Yeah. Is why this could happen is because we create
this job that doesn't do us. Does it create do
anything for us except cause problems? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Before and after?

Speaker 1 (01:06:05):
Yeah, all all I was ever my job was in
the military was just to kill people. Right, That's like
like all they wanted me doing is just going and
gunning down strangers every night, And that's all the cartel's
going to have me do.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Right, Like I'm ready to do this job.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
You know, if you're still physically and mentally capable, if
it hasn't, if the work hasn't run.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
You through, just occasionally use pliers in an interesting way
to fucking make a make a different kind of tripod
in the field or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
Other than that, it's cool stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Uh yeah, I uh well, we'll talk a lot more
about this, about all this good stuff. But first, you know,
another week has to pass because you're only legally allowed
two episodes behind the Bastards a week. Sometimes we give
you a third, but every time we do that, it's
a felony and we have to throw one of our
employees under the bus and they go to prison for
life for life. Well, so every time we do a

(01:06:59):
three parr or just think of that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:00):
You know, you got them out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
Get them out of it, Robert, just call up.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
No, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
I don't believe in being unaccountable. It's important for us
to be accountable.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
You know, that's right. You'll do the crime someone else
does have to. Someone else will pay the time, someone else.
Good stuff. Anyway, plug a bug, are we not?

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
Yeah? Yeah, Starter Trek, it's my new Star Trek podcast.
With Tony Newsome jesse Gender. It's on the same feed
as Jos's racist used to be. We're having a lot
of fun. Come listen. Everyone here probably loves Star Trek enough.
I'm I'm new to Star Trek that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
So don't feel like you got to be a Star
Trek fan to get into it. M yeah, but you
should be a Star Trek fan. It's good, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
I'm getting there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
Anyway, I don't know. Don't don't join the military. Avoid
that if if you can, We're done. Behind the Bastards
is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or
check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

(01:08:14):
wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.

Speaker 1 (01:08:21):
Kit remind me on Netflix you don't miss an episode.
For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe
to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
the Bastards. We love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,